xed group of deaf school leavers and girl trafficking survivors from the Indian circuses - have been working on a large mosaic of a jungle scene with a sinister tiger. It measures 5 feet by 8 feet and the original design was by our volunteer art teacher from this time last year, Rebecca Hawkins. The work has just been completed and now it is on its way to an appreciative wall in Kathmandu. We hope this beautiful piece with spark some orders from discerning customers in Nepal.
Showing posts with label Rebecca Hawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rebecca Hawkins. Show all posts
Friday, 27 February 2009
Burning bright
For the past few months our students at the Bhairahawa art workshop - a mi
xed group of deaf school leavers and girl trafficking survivors from the Indian circuses - have been working on a large mosaic of a jungle scene with a sinister tiger. It measures 5 feet by 8 feet and the original design was by our volunteer art teacher from this time last year, Rebecca Hawkins. The work has just been completed and now it is on its way to an appreciative wall in Kathmandu. We hope this beautiful piece with spark some orders from discerning customers in Nepal.
xed group of deaf school leavers and girl trafficking survivors from the Indian circuses - have been working on a large mosaic of a jungle scene with a sinister tiger. It measures 5 feet by 8 feet and the original design was by our volunteer art teacher from this time last year, Rebecca Hawkins. The work has just been completed and now it is on its way to an appreciative wall in Kathmandu. We hope this beautiful piece with spark some orders from discerning customers in Nepal.
Thursday, 22 May 2008
The Sundhara Project
Since March this year we have been training deaf school leavers in Bhairahawa, southwest 
Nepal, in mosaic art techniques. This initiative was profiled in an article, "Silent Beauty", in the Nepali Times of 21st March. The trainees have been learning the basics in advance of our major mosaic project at a cafe in Sundhara, Kathmandu. The link is that this is one of the Nanglos "bakery cafe" chain that is distinctive in its favouring the employment of deaf and other disabled staff. The plan is to place a large mosaic in each of ten wall panels that surround the open air atrium that serves as the cafe's dining and function area.
Sculptor Rebecca Hawkins, who earlier this year was a volunteer art tutor
at our workshops for child trafficking survivors, is designing the artwork, using as a theme the wildlife of the Terai (the southern strip of Nepal). This morning she sent me her design for the first of the panels (see right). She'll now have an input from my friend British professional mosaic artist Jo Letchford and then the young deaf artists can get started on those tiles. The project will be part funded by the cafe and by two schools, Sha Tin College in Hong Kong and Kingston Grammar in the UK.
Rebecca (wearing black) is shown in the video below measuring up the panels at the cafe, assisted by Esther Benjamins Trust staff member, Camilla Kinchin, who is coordinating the project.
I hope this will be the first of many such projects in Nepal that will raise the profile of disabled and other stigmatised groups within society.
Nepal, in mosaic art techniques. This initiative was profiled in an article, "Silent Beauty", in the Nepali Times of 21st March. The trainees have been learning the basics in advance of our major mosaic project at a cafe in Sundhara, Kathmandu. The link is that this is one of the Nanglos "bakery cafe" chain that is distinctive in its favouring the employment of deaf and other disabled staff. The plan is to place a large mosaic in each of ten wall panels that surround the open air atrium that serves as the cafe's dining and function area.Sculptor Rebecca Hawkins, who earlier this year was a volunteer art tutor
at our workshops for child trafficking survivors, is designing the artwork, using as a theme the wildlife of the Terai (the southern strip of Nepal). This morning she sent me her design for the first of the panels (see right). She'll now have an input from my friend British professional mosaic artist Jo Letchford and then the young deaf artists can get started on those tiles. The project will be part funded by the cafe and by two schools, Sha Tin College in Hong Kong and Kingston Grammar in the UK.Rebecca (wearing black) is shown in the video below measuring up the panels at the cafe, assisted by Esther Benjamins Trust staff member, Camilla Kinchin, who is coordinating the project.
I hope this will be the first of many such projects in Nepal that will raise the profile of disabled and other stigmatised groups within society.
Thursday, 13 March 2008
Grey-backed shrike
I paid a long overdue visit to the arts rehabilitation centre today; sadly I have been distracted recently by working visits to India and the like. But it was good to find morale so high in both students and teachers. Ceramicist Alex Hunter has been replaced by local potter Hari Govinda Prajapati (Hari Potter?) who is a leading light within the Kathmandu ceramics scene, so that has been a good catch for us. Rebecca Hawkins remains full of enthusiasm a couple of months into her attachment and her regret at having to leave us at the end of the month is quite tangible. She has been really taken with the whole enterprise and told me today of how amazed she had been at the transformation in the students' demeanours even over a few weeks. To me this seems to be an infinitely more successful approach to managing troubled min
ds than bringing in a troop of counsellors.
ds than bringing in a troop of counsellors.
I took this photograph this morning of a Grey-backed shrike sitting in the bush outside my office window. It's not uncommon in this part of Nepal but it's a quite beautiful bird, often heard (it has a distinctive shreek) before it is seen. It's beautiful enough for us to have translated it into mosaic in the past.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Our volunteer sculptor's letter from Nepal
Rebecca Hawkins is a professional sculptor who is coordinating the second of my Trust's Child Trafficking Victims Art Workshops, designed to offer creative art therapy and vocatio
nal training to children and young women we rescue from bonded labour in India’s circuses.
She has already made a great impact with the children – many of whom have been mentally, physically and sexually abused over a sustained period of time. Here, in this report I received today, Rebecca describes her experience so far...
"When I arrived here, I had never taught before – and for those of you who haven’t either, I would like to share something with you: teaching is exhausting! I feel compelled to apologise to my teachers for any times I caused them to wish that they’d pursued a different career path. It’s not that I was a particularly troublesome pupil - in fact, I was a relatively quiet girl - but Art was the only thing I was ever really interested in, so teachers of other subjects had to work extra hard to keep my attention.
Three weeks into my 3-month placement here, I already realise how challenging teaching can be. The worst thing is that I know for a fact that as extremely privileged public school girls, we were 100% more problematic than the eager (if a little self doubting) girls I am lucky enough and honoured to be teaching.
Art is not everyone’s cup of tea and positioning myself as the teacher trying to impart my knowledge of the subject to students has certainly taught me how much I take for granted my ability to draw or form something three dimensional without much effort. It has always been that way for me, but for these girls who five months ago were more practiced on a tightrope or a unicycle, being forced to draw a still life and get to grips with the finer points of perspective and form must be totally bemusing and baffling. Especially when the person teaching them is trying to explain it in very poor pigeon Nepali!
What we put our teachers through makes me shudder to remember, and I feel an immense shame at how ungrateful we were for the education we received when I consider by comparison just how much these girls have been through, and see every day how willingly these victims of a very poor society are tackling every challenge I throw at them with a smile - and I have thrown them plenty!
I should point out at this juncture that the main reason for being here is to teach sculpture, but I strongly believe that if you can understand form and perspective by drawing it, then it will benefit everything you turn your hand to. I decided from the start that the only way to work out what they could and could not handle was to chuck them in the deep end and see if they swam.
Not really realising that most of them had never actually drawn before - every child I know grows up doodling and drawing something - I set up a complicated still life consisting of lots of fruit, mugs and a big brass water container. Knowing the culture for copying here, I made sure every angle presented a different picture and that plenty of the fruit overlapped so that they would be forced to actually look at what was in front of them instead of just drawing how they perceived it to be.
After an initial nervousness from both parties (did I mention I had never taught before?), the girls settled down to draw, only to rub out every small line they made. I decided to remove all rubbers, only to discover that a couple of them had their own and were passing them around underneath the table!
An hour into the session, I was so exhausted that I had to send them off for a 10 minute break – I was also aware that they were taking in a lot of new information. However, if by lunchtime they were paddling, then by the end of the day they were well and truly swimming and tackling the art of shading. I was exhausted but totally amazed by them.
The next morning they were horrified to discover that they had a totally new still life. I deliberately placed the girls who had excelled on a side of the table where the challenge was harder, with the task made a little simpler on the other side for the girls who had struggled. Again the girls exceeded my expectations, lapping up my instructions and advice - Nepali phrasebook in one hand and sketch pad to draw examples in the other - leaving me at the end of the day proud and humbled by their achievements and determination.
In the ensuing 2 weeks I have introduced them to relief sculpture, which they are modelling in clay and then casting in plaster. It is a serious challenge for them, and one they are proving that they are more than up to, despite not always believing it themselves! The aim of this is to help them understand 3-dimensional form but without the stresses of gravity. It also introduces them to materials, skills and methods that can be used in conjunction with mosaic and may one day be useful if commissions for bathrooms, gardens and general interiors are undertaken.
Teaching in a foreign language has challenges of its own and there are moments when I feel totally bemused by my inability to express myself. For their patience in these times, as I scrabble through my phrasebook for the closest words to explain myself, I am truly grateful.
My time here so far has been without a doubt the most humbling and rewarding of my life. The enthusiasm and determination with which the girls have battled to understand what I am trying to teach them continues to surprise me every day and I am in no doubt that they will continue to do so for the remainder of my stay. My only hope is that their patience with my lack of Nepali can match the total awe and amazement in which I hold them."
nal training to children and young women we rescue from bonded labour in India’s circuses.She has already made a great impact with the children – many of whom have been mentally, physically and sexually abused over a sustained period of time. Here, in this report I received today, Rebecca describes her experience so far...
"When I arrived here, I had never taught before – and for those of you who haven’t either, I would like to share something with you: teaching is exhausting! I feel compelled to apologise to my teachers for any times I caused them to wish that they’d pursued a different career path. It’s not that I was a particularly troublesome pupil - in fact, I was a relatively quiet girl - but Art was the only thing I was ever really interested in, so teachers of other subjects had to work extra hard to keep my attention.
Three weeks into my 3-month placement here, I already realise how challenging teaching can be. The worst thing is that I know for a fact that as extremely privileged public school girls, we were 100% more problematic than the eager (if a little self doubting) girls I am lucky enough and honoured to be teaching.
Art is not everyone’s cup of tea and positioning myself as the teacher trying to impart my knowledge of the subject to students has certainly taught me how much I take for granted my ability to draw or form something three dimensional without much effort. It has always been that way for me, but for these girls who five months ago were more practiced on a tightrope or a unicycle, being forced to draw a still life and get to grips with the finer points of perspective and form must be totally bemusing and baffling. Especially when the person teaching them is trying to explain it in very poor pigeon Nepali!
What we put our teachers through makes me shudder to remember, and I feel an immense shame at how ungrateful we were for the education we received when I consider by comparison just how much these girls have been through, and see every day how willingly these victims of a very poor society are tackling every challenge I throw at them with a smile - and I have thrown them plenty!
I should point out at this juncture that the main reason for being here is to teach sculpture, but I strongly believe that if you can understand form and perspective by drawing it, then it will benefit everything you turn your hand to. I decided from the start that the only way to work out what they could and could not handle was to chuck them in the deep end and see if they swam.
Not really realising that most of them had never actually drawn before - every child I know grows up doodling and drawing something - I set up a complicated still life consisting of lots of fruit, mugs and a big brass water container. Knowing the culture for copying here, I made sure every angle presented a different picture and that plenty of the fruit overlapped so that they would be forced to actually look at what was in front of them instead of just drawing how they perceived it to be.
After an initial nervousness from both parties (did I mention I had never taught before?), the girls settled down to draw, only to rub out every small line they made. I decided to remove all rubbers, only to discover that a couple of them had their own and were passing them around underneath the table!
An hour into the session, I was so exhausted that I had to send them off for a 10 minute break – I was also aware that they were taking in a lot of new information. However, if by lunchtime they were paddling, then by the end of the day they were well and truly swimming and tackling the art of shading. I was exhausted but totally amazed by them.
The next morning they were horrified to discover that they had a totally new still life. I deliberately placed the girls who had excelled on a side of the table where the challenge was harder, with the task made a little simpler on the other side for the girls who had struggled. Again the girls exceeded my expectations, lapping up my instructions and advice - Nepali phrasebook in one hand and sketch pad to draw examples in the other - leaving me at the end of the day proud and humbled by their achievements and determination.
In the ensuing 2 weeks I have introduced them to relief sculpture, which they are modelling in clay and then casting in plaster. It is a serious challenge for them, and one they are proving that they are more than up to, despite not always believing it themselves! The aim of this is to help them understand 3-dimensional form but without the stresses of gravity. It also introduces them to materials, skills and methods that can be used in conjunction with mosaic and may one day be useful if commissions for bathrooms, gardens and general interiors are undertaken.
Teaching in a foreign language has challenges of its own and there are moments when I feel totally bemused by my inability to express myself. For their patience in these times, as I scrabble through my phrasebook for the closest words to explain myself, I am truly grateful.
My time here so far has been without a doubt the most humbling and rewarding of my life. The enthusiasm and determination with which the girls have battled to understand what I am trying to teach them continues to surprise me every day and I am in no doubt that they will continue to do so for the remainder of my stay. My only hope is that their patience with my lack of Nepali can match the total awe and amazement in which I hold them."
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